Can't take my mind off of you
by acciograce
Summary: Peeta daydreamed about Katniss long before she knew how he felt. Katniss couldn't stop thinking about Peeta long after he forgot how he loved her. Canon – set during The Hunger Games, Mockingjay, and pre-epilogue.


No matter how explicit or shamelessly dirty Peeta Mellark's fantasies about Katniss Everdeen sometimes get, they always seem to center on the same simple question.

In history class last week, he daydreamed that Katniss's book bag split open as she bolted for the door after the bell rang. She crouched and began to pick up the books and papers and that were strewn across the faded tile floor. He knelt down beside her, stopped a rolling pencil deftly with his knuckle and handed it to her.

"Can I help you with that?" He asked, gesturing to the armful of school supplies balanced precariously in her hands. And she looked at him shyly, her magnetic grey eyes finding his, a soft smile dancing across her lips.

When she kissed him – in his fantasies, she always kissed him first – her lips were warm and her mouth inviting. When she straddled him and moved to unbuckle his belt, he tried to protest – they were going too fast, they barely knew each other after all. But then his name was a moan on her lips, her hair loose and wild, eyes dark with desire. She looked down at him and said, "I need you."

In this fantasy, she rode him like she'd been waiting to do it forever.

Delly Cartwright had to say his name four times before he realized that history was over, and he was going to have to carry his books in front of him on the way to his next class.

Last month, in the dead of night, he stroked himself to completion with a particularly involved fantasy about finding Katniss behind the bakery. She was lugging an animal – deer, dog, maybe a huge bird, it really didn't matter – to the butcher's shop at the end of the alley. But it was heavy, and she was shaking from the exertion of it all.

Gale Hawthorne was nowhere in sight – he never was when Peeta thought of Katniss, as unrealistic as that part of his fantasies may have been. So Peeta wiped his hands down on his apron, jogged up to catch her, and asked, "Can I help you with that?"

She didn't smile, but something like gratitude flashed in her eyes. She accepted his help, and they carried the animal together the rest of the way. The whole time, he could feel her eyes on his back, watching him intently.

On the short walk back to the bakery's rear door, he said something like, "I always see you around town."

And she said, "I've seen you, too."

And then, as usual, one thing led to another and she was kissing him desperately and guiding his hand to her breast.

He took her up against the brick wall, moving slowly, savoring every second of being inside of her. She raised her hips in perfect time with his thrusts, both of them careful to muffle their sighs of pleasure with heated kisses.

When he came, it was to the thought of what her hair would feel like tangled in his fingers as he held the back of her head in his hand to keep it from hitting the wall.

Tonight, as the train to the Capitol speeds along, propelling him too quickly toward his death, he's lying in a new bed. The sheets are crisp and smell chemically clean, and his stomach is full for the first time in a very long time. But he can think only of Katniss again. Of greeting her tomorrow morning in the dining car – maybe offering her tea or toast. She'll be tired, and mostly silent – she won't have slept much, either. Somehow he knows this much about her.

He'll ask her how she's feeling, and after some initial resistance, she'll open up to him. Tell him she just wants to go home to Twelve to be with her sister again. And he'll smile at her and say, "Can I help you with that?"

* * *

Katniss can't sleep, though she needs the rest now more than ever. It's her watch soon. She might as well just get up now, and relieve Boggs or Mitchell and give up on it altogether. But she can't bring herself to leave the warmth of her sleeping bag – to silence the thoughts that float, unbidden and unwanted, through her mind.

It was the way Peeta looked at her when they all sat around the fire tonight. While he no longer looks at her with open contempt, she's only seen mistrust and apprehension in his eyes since the moment he arrived to join the squad. But for just one second – _just _one – he glanced over at her and the flames caught his eye just right and the look he gave her then took her right back into the arena.

Longing and fear. Two radically different emotions that cannot be reconciled. Somehow both present in his eyes.

She saw those feelings there when they were on the beach. Before he gave into her; before his warm hands skated against her bare skin. Before those kisses – kisses she never expected from the boy with the bread, kisses that hinted at a different kind of survival.

He looked at her like he might have remembered that he loved her. No, not _that_ he did. _Why_ he did.

But he doesn't remember. There's no point in pretending he does. Because there will be no more kisses – no more survival to work for in some distant, unspecified future point in time.

There's only the broken boy; his memories of her and them and what they meant to each other ravaged by Capitol poison. And there's her, alone now, fighting for a country she's begrudgingly lead into a rebellion, and for the sleep that she knows won't come.

Because her thoughts just can't leave him behind. It's just like before he was rescued, but in so many ways it's worse worse. Knowing he's out there, just beyond the flimsy tent walls. Knowing she can't reach him. A game of Crazy Cat that will keep going until she takes her last breath.

Katniss knows that even if she shoots an arrow straight into President Snow's heart and watches the life drain out of him, in this way he will have won at least one victory over her.

Victory. Victors. Survival. Surviving.

Such hollow ideas, no matter how you word them.

She doesn't want to but she thinks of the beach again. When she closes her eyes she can still feel the way their limbs tangled together; smell the salt on his skin; hear his ragged breath as he dragged his lips across her jaw.

The fire that stokes deep in her belly isn't as bold or immediate as it was when they were together. But she feels it, still – remembers and wants it again and hates herself for that. Because she's never been in the business of letting herself want things that were out of her reach. And there is nothing more unattainable than Peeta Mellark now.

Still, she can't drag her mind away from him. And the what ifs. What if they had left the arena together? Would he be in here with her now? Yes, she knows he would be. He'd wrap his arms around her, keeping her warm and calming her mind the way he did on the train.

And she would thread her hands through his and press as close to him as she could, memorizing his form, melding her body to his. He would kiss her –_really_ kiss her, like on the beach. But there would be no cameras watching them, there would be no hesitation on his part. She would show him she was his and he would claim her, become a part of her. They would make each other whole.

She touches herself then, running her fingers rapidly over her clit and stifling a moan by biting her lip just a little too hard. Now she's eager to just be done with it, to find her release so that the desire for him will diminish to nothing more than a dull, persistent ache.

When she comes, it's to the thought of him inside her – guiding her through the pleasure with that look in his eyes. Longing, fear, and the memory of love.

Katniss curses softly as she catches her breath. She hates how powerless she's become to these fantasies because that is all they will ever be. And despite her release, she's no closer to sleep now. If anything, her mind is racing even harder.

So she gets up. Boggs, and Mitchell and Peeta, too, still in the same spot, still staring at the fire. They're playing that game, the one they made up to help him sort his mind out. Trying to put him back together, one piece of reality at a time.

He glances at her and it _hurts_, how vulnerable and confused he looks. Boggs doesn't notice that he's lost Peeta's attention as he calmly describes Caesar Flickerman's hair during their first tribute interviews. But she does. He's watching her still – aware of her presence, as always, even now. That's one thing, at least, that Snow couldn't rob him of.

So she sits down across from him at the fire, leaning in close to warm her hands, and says, "Can I help?"

* * *

It takes both of them a long time to acknowledge the loneliness. The burn scars fade. But the survival in the wake of so much loss threatens to overpower them at times. Because the primrose bushes can't milk goats, and the brand new bakery is just too quiet without brothers and fathers and angry mothers to keep it running.

Haymitch says they'll get used to it. But he still sleeps with a knife in his hand, even after the first year without a reaping passes. And when he wakes from the nightmares, he still stabs blindly at the ghosts of those who took what he loved from him so long ago.

Katniss and Peeta make many mistakes as they learn to live in the quiet.

Sometimes they want so badly for the ones they miss the most to return that they spend whole days reveling in the pain of it. They try to will them back into existence, holding fast to the futile dream of a different result. One in which the dead ones, too, can enjoy the newfound peace.

With each other, it's two steps forward, three steps back sometimes – breaking through, and then breaking away. But they learn to keep each other company, weather bad days and celebrate the good ones. And it takes almost a year before they're both ready to come together the way they used to imagine they would.

It takes the book.

They sit in front of the large window in the living room. Sunlight streams through the sill and spills onto the table as Peeta puts the finishing touches on a sketch of his father, perfectly recreating the salt and pepper of his hair.

Katniss tries to transcribe the essence of what made Prim so good. She pours memories onto the pages of their book, golden hair, untucked shirts and healing hands. She cries.

She looks to Peeta, who is already looking at her. And he is beautiful. He gives her the soft, patient smile that she knows is meant for only her.

His eyes meet hers and she wipes the last of the tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand. She sees so much in his gaze – not clouded with manufactured rage anymore, but clear, and blue and almost whole.

She sees the love and fear and longing. And she feels it all, too.

And though she doesn't know it yet, tonight she'll feel it all even more. She will kiss him first, needy and hard, and he will look at her uncertainly for only a second. Not because he doesn't want it, or because of the hazy hijacked thoughts that still crop up from time to time. But because he can't completely believe it's real.

And after, when they lay together - Peeta still inside her, her hands tracing the lines of the scars on his back – she will tell him that it is.

Now, Peeta gestures to Prim's page, filled with words, save the space where he will draw her little sister with two braids and a hopeful glint in her eye. And he smiles when he speaks.

"Can I help you with that?"

- end -

* * *

**Note: **

This was written for misshoneywell's incredible Prompts in Panem: Day 3 - Queen Anne's Lace. The prompt was:

"Fantasy"  
An illusion, hallucination, fable, or daydream. Fantasies are mental images about events that have not happened but often fulfill a psychological need or wish.  
Fantastical worlds or universes that contain elements of magic or other supernatural phenomena may also be included in your fan works.


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